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Comment by vikingerik | Hacker News Reader

You're thinking of South Pole Station. That's mostly one large building for a few dozen people, and very photogenic for snowbound isolation, so it's usually the picture used for Antarctica articles.

(McMurdo is not at the south pole, it's on the coast near New Zealand.) (Edit since I keep getting nitpicked - near in relative terms, it's at NZ's longitude and closer to NZ than to anywhere else.)

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That isn’t what I was thinking of. I wasn’t even aware there was more than one research facility in Antarctica. I was going purely off of the name.

That's what I meant - subconsciously you probably were thinking of the base that is the South Pole Station, since that's the one with more pictures of it and that's the location where you'd intuitively expect an antarctic base to be.

Near? It's 99 miles!

https://distcalculator.com/distance-between/106093/New-Zeala...

"If average speed of your car will be standard for this route between New Zealand and McMurdo, Antarctica and road conditions will be as usual, time that you will need to arrive to McMurdo, Antarctica will be 1 hour."

That site is getting confused by New Zealand's Antarctic Scott base.

NZ proper is about least 1,500 miles from Antarctica.

Scott Base is easy walking distance from McMurdo, not 99 miles (or 100 kilometers and 100 miles and 100 nautical miles - that site is quite confused!).

Both are actually in New Zealand depending on the purpose, due to the Ross Dependency[1]. For instance, most of those folks in McMurdo station have longer NZ visas than typical US tourists visiting NZ would get (3 months), because when they fly down to The Ice they're not technically leaving the country.

An interesting corner case is when something happens at one of the US stations in the Ross Dependency, which New Zealand wants to investigate. The Rodney Marks death[2] is a particularly well-known example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Dependency

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Marks

I think distcalculator is buggy:

"Distance between New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA is 99 miles.

If average speed of your car will be standard for this route between New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA and road conditions will be as usual, time that you will need to arrive to Los Angeles, CA will be 1 hour."

It appears to return "99 miles" for any pair of locations, even between a location and itself, or to nonexistent locations (like "Narnia").

McMurdo is 2385 miles from Christchurch NZ, where support flights originate[0]. Flying from the south coast of NZ at Invercargill saves 208 miles[1]. It's 3222 miles to the South Pole[2].

[0] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=CHC-NZIR [1] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=NZNV-NZIR [2] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=CHC-NZSP

I'm typing this in New Zealand at latitude 42 degrees south (so about half way from the equator to the pole). So no, not near NZ, a bit less than 1/8 of the circumstance of the Earth away, maybe 1/10, more than 2000 miles.

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